


Storm

by cmonlauraweremarriednow



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-02
Updated: 2017-11-02
Packaged: 2019-03-06 08:53:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13407747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cmonlauraweremarriednow/pseuds/cmonlauraweremarriednow
Summary: "Please Mulder, don't let me regret having ever loved you"





	Storm

The strangled words drop from her lips like water from a rusty faucet, quiet, barely perceptible, tinged red with a corrosion of resentment built up over years.

He had no one to blame but himself. It was easy to distract himself during their days on the run. Always looking down the long stretches of empty road to the next town, the next roadside motel, the next box of hair dye from the pharmacy shelf. They managed to stay just ahead of clouds creeping from the horizon behind them.

Underneath their carefully crafted identities, roiling seas crashed against jagged rocks, a portent of the impending storm.

She tugs on his hand, willing him to look at her; he doesn’t, gaze fixed firmly on the floor. Her hand slides to his unshaven jaw.

“Mulder.”

But when they stopped running, the darkness they had been fleeing caught up to him. He no longer had anything to occupy his mind and the leaden nimbostrati licking at his Achilles heel swallowed him entirely. He was absent, distant, consumed by the quagmire of his own obsessions.

Her other hand comes up to grip his face between them. She dips her head under his, forehead to forehead, forcing his eyes to meet hers.

“Where are you?”

He’s drowning. Drowning in conspiracies, drowning in lies, drowning in stolen little sisters and cancer chips and plots for alien colonization. Drowning in the roughshod seas of his mind, barely slipping out of the grasp of the tentacled creatures of the deep trying to pull him under for good. Drowning, but he never gets to die. He’s just constantly treading water, trying to stay afloat, waves breaking overhead, but he still always resurfaces, no matter how badly he might not want to.

Forehead replaced with lips, pressed into his skull with a final whispered plea.

“Come back to me.”

The eye of the storm is always the calmest. You can’t see the extent of the damage while the storm is raging, swirling around you caught in the middle. You can see it happening, but you’re powerless to stop it. It’s not until after, when the rain has stopped pouring, the wind howling, the flood receding, that the true extent of the damage can be seen, standing amongst the rubbled wreckage of your life wondering what the hell happened.

When he looks up, she’s gone. A dustless suitcase outline mars the wooden floor by the front door. She does not come back.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments make me the happiest clam in all the sea  
> You can also follow me on Tumblr [@realmofextremepossibility!](http://realmofextremepossibility.tumblr.com)


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